POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : [Plug] It's finally here! : Re: [Plug] It's finally here! Server Time
9 Oct 2024 22:25:50 EDT (-0400)
  Re: [Plug] It's finally here!  
From: Warp
Date: 10 Oct 2008 10:17:20
Message: <48ef63f0@news.povray.org>
Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Hmm. The introduction seems to promise things that don't actually work 
> for me. Chapter 1 seems nice, but Chapter 2... is... an entire chapter 
> on the type system.

> Now *I* understand why this is so. But a Haskell newbie? They're 
> probably not going to understand.

  There are basically two ways of writing this type of book, depending on
your target audience: Either make it a tutorial-style self-study book for
people who haven't used that language before, or assume your target
audience mostly consists of computing scientists. In the latter case the
book is more an academic paper than a self-study book.

  Of course you can try to go the mid-ground and try to appeal to both
target audiences at the same time, but that's a very hard genre to pull
out successfully. It's very easy to make the book just a bit too academic
for laymen to understand, and just a bit too mundane to keep the scientists
interested. In other words, it's difficult to raise interest in both target
audiences at the same time, without alienating at least one of them.

-- 
                                                          - Warp


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